Making Jambalaya In Advance

Kenneth Fearing's The Big Clock

Kenneth Fearing's The Big Clock , Einaudi Stile Libero, 2001

rating 8 / 10

well Luca Conti says in an afterword, when framed in the coordinates Todoroviane George Stroud:

The crime is done in the first pages and suspicions of the police focus on a certain person (the main character). To prove his innocence, he must contrive to find the culprit, even if it means he risks his life. We can say that, in this case, the main character is both the detective, the culprit (in the eyes of the police) and the victim (potential) of the real murderers. ^a

and similarly known as sharply, despite the chorus of voices, but never for a second degree, focused on a single event, the structure of the novel can not be ascribed in focus Multiple internal theorized by Genette 2. Crime and the guilty are known from the beginning, and, paradoxically, the protagonist will have to investigate itself (with nearly unlimited available sources) to prove his guilt, all the orders of his boss, the real murderess. The book is a series of short chapters narrated in first person, in which almost all the players tell the story in which they are involved. The development of the story is then given from the evolution of the investigations, the crime you know everything at once, but by the protagonist's attempts to juggle the huge gear mechanisms ³ that he helps create. Fearing outlines the characters in an essential and intelligent, does mean everything to them, often with a genuinely surprising and successful posting the obvious, until the reader comes to know of the affair more of the same protagonists. Despite the apparent structural complexity, the story develops in a linear fashion, with the points of view on almost never contemporary, the narrative engine is powered by tiny bits of history combined with compelling characters - such as the beautiful and successful figure of the bartender junk.

1 Tzvetan Todorov, type of detective story, in " Comparison ," No 202, pp 3-14, 1966, then in Poétique de la prose, pp. 55-65, Seuil, Paris 1971 (trad. it. Poetics of Prose: the laws of narrative , Bompiani, Milano 1995)

2 new accounts proves to be very careful in take as an example of applying this theory the film 'Rashomon' of Kurosawa

3 The huge gear acute is the translation of the title in the first Italian edition